I am sure everyone who is reading this has seen the new Discord announcement about age-verification, but if you haven’t or if you didn’t read the entire thing all the way through because the modern internet has wrecked your attention span as badly as it has mine, here it is.
I am seeing a lot of people stating that they don’t trust Discord with their personal information, and I think a lot of people in my circles are expecting me to agree with them.
They’re wrong: you do trust Discord with your personal information. Discord messages are not encrypted. They are kept forever, on Discord servers indefinitely. Every time you send a photo or a document in Discord, you are trusting Discord with your personal information. Every time you message someone your birthday, or your address, or your paypal/venmo— that’s now in Discord until you delete it from your message history, which from my experience, people don’t.
This is why, in the announcement, Discord has announced this:
Additionally, Discord will implement its age inference model, a new system that runs in the background to help determine whether an account belongs to an adult, without always requiring users to verify their age.
Discord knows it can verify a lot of users without any actual verification, and it’s announcing as much right in the text of the post.
For the people who will need to do a selfie, Discord plans to keep that verification on-device, and since it’s already implemented the selfie-verification in Australia, we would have heard about it if it was clearly offloading the work: remember, Discord is mainstream *now* but its core group is the kind of nerd who would deploy their own TeamSpeak 3 server to play DotA. The people who care about this stuff and have the knowledge to check it are sitting on the service right now, ready to sniff ports and launch Discord in Airplane Mode to run the scan. If you’re tagged for verification, you can always wait a week or two before doing it to see if anything comes out.
Now, for the elephant in the room, the vendor breach that Discord experienced back in September:
Discord no longer uses that vendor; they fired them immediately after the breach, disclosed the breach immediately, and contacted all affected users immediately. Anyone who has ever checked out haveibeenpwned knows how freaking rare that all actually is. The new vendor is the same vendor Snap and Meta are using for the same service, which might be reassuring or might just be a sign of our bleakly narrowing internet world, but either way, that vendor may very well already have your data if you have ever verified your age on FB, IG, WhatsApp, Threads, Oculus, or Snapchat. Sending your ID to them is up to you if you don’t pass the silent check or the selfie check, and I’m not going to offer advice either way, but again, they do ID verification for *Meta*, the company with shadow profiles on every human on earth, even the tribesmen of North Sentinel Island, probably.
I moderate several age-gated spaces in Discord. I have those spaces age-gated for a reason: I don’t enjoy the idea of strangers’ children accessing my adult content. Discord has decided that instead of mods of each individual space moderating access to adult content, they are going to do it for me.
I’m mostly okay with that. The same way I’m mostly okay with Discord knowing the contents of every message I have ever sent my sister, my mom, my fandom BFF, strangers, my coworkers, and my neighbors. I understand if other people are not okay with this, but I need everyone who cares about my opinion to know: Discord already has your personal information.
baratheonpilled
blakekathryn
vaporwave
prguitarman
andulkaphoto
ellievsbear
origamiaround
titsay
discoholicmusic
